The Disadvantages of Spreadsheets: Teamwork

It is common knowledge that teamwork is the
backbone of any organization and every team has to find the tools that suit
namely them. But what about resource management software?

There’s no doubt about it, but the most popular tool used are spreadsheets and regardless of the brand (Excel, Calc, Numbers etc), in essence, the working principle remains the same.

Budgeting, planning or any other kind of forecasting is quite difficult when you think, how much collaborative data is actually needed to get any work done. In addition, most of the data is needed from different people or even departments.

You can always gather the materials and try to merge them to your existing table, but needless to say, should there be any differences to what you’re used to, the whole thing could turn up to be a small nightmare.

Spreadsheets are great, offering you endless possibilities, to analyze your data in any way you like. However there enlay the problem – the more possibilities a program or application offers, the more likely someone is bound to make an error.

In my years of being an entrepreneur, the one I’ve learned is that teamwork is anything but static: constant schedulings and reschedulings, trying one way and the other and so on, are the sole proof, that in teamwork, you have to be ready for quick changes. Now, when you think about, how ‘easy’ it is to change things using spreadsheets, what comes to mind? In my case, I usually start cursing.

When working with spreadsheets, you also have to keep in mind, that no spreadsheet has only one copy, but several. And you might think you have the most ingenious way of storing the files, making errors impossible to occur, but take my word for it – it’s a problem just waiting to happen.

You may be a small or a big company, local or international, it still means your entire organization, is one big team. Keeping that in mind, why not use a tool that keeps all the collaborators in mind.